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SBC Demands Royalties for Links in Frames
John Miles writes "Offering yet another persuasive argument in favor of employee substance-abuse testing at the US Patent and Trademark Office, SBC Communications is asserting exclusive ownership of the concept of links in browser frames. With SBC's convenient new rate plan, now you, too, can afford to license your favorite HTML feature!"
Wouldn't this patent cover Windows Explorer?
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
makes me wonder if the letter is legit, and not some scammer.
SBC Communications claims they own Patent on Internal links and Includes, threatens to sue the little guys first, then move to the big guys.
We received a 40 page package from SBC Intellectual Property today informing us that our web site - which has links on the left side that go to other web pages within the site - but does not lose the left side navigation links - was in violation of their "Structured Document Browser" Patent.
Here is the letter that was sent to us.
January 14th, 2003
Dear President of MuseumTour.com
SBC Intellectual Property is the owner of US Patent no. 5,933,841 entitled "Stuctured Document Browser". The purpose of this letter is to advise you of an opportunity to acquire a license to the patents - view patent link at the bottom of this pag.:
- We recently observed several useful navigation features within the user interface or your site www.museumtour.com. For example your site includes several selectors or tabs that correspond to specific locations within your site documents. These selectors seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface. And, as such, the selectors are not lost when a different part of the document is displayed to the user - see screen shots from museumtour.com enclosed. By sperating the selectors from the content, Museumetour has truly simplified site navigation and improved the shopping experience for its users.
As you review the Structured Document Patent you will notice that the above-discussed features appear to infringe several issued claims in our patent. In light of Museum Tours presumed respect for the intellectual property rights of others, we are pleased to offer you a Preferred Rate license under the structured Document Patent - see enclosed rate schedule -
Actual licensing amounts are calculated using SBC's then current Royalty equation. SBC will gladly determine your actual licensing amount if you provide us with your 2002 Company Gross Revnue (their fees are based on how much annual revenue the company does).
For your convenience and to assist your analysis of the patent, I have enclosed a document that charts the claim language of an example claim to your site structure.
After reviewing the patents and determining wheather you prefer a prepaid license or a recurring annual licence please contact Ms. Jill Walker at 512.231.7008 to determin your actual royalty amount. If you have your 2002 gross revenue number Ms. Walker will provide you with an accurate oyalty number and will facilityate the execution of an appropriate license.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Sincerly,
Harlie D. Frost
President
It's worth noting that the cited patent is dated 3rd August, 1999, nearly two years after the 1997 release of the W3C HTML 4 specification, which added, among other things, support for frames in HTML.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Here. Seems strange that he refers to himself as president in the letter but the SBC TRI website refers to him as vice president... maybe the site is just outdated.
Seems that if you could find an old piece of software that displayed some type of content with even a normal top menu to navigate between it would constitute prior art.
What about some old image viewing program that displays a list of file names and has a thumbnail preview ?
It's fairly sad that you can patent the equivalent of a book with tabs that stick out a bit from the pages.
i can't wait for them to sue the united states government for patent infringement.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
Interestingly enough, it seems to cover both browsers that have the capability of multi-frame links and the actual use of such links. (I could be wrong; I quickly scanned it instead of reading. Correct me if I am.)
It also was submitted May 1996 and granted August 1999. So if we're looking for prior use, we need to be focusing on the 1996 date, I imagine.
Also of note: the assignee is AmeriTech Corporation of Hoffman Estates, IL. Wonder what relationship they have to SBC?
Why not post the link to the actual patent instead of a useless uspto.gov main page, if it does indeed exist ?
I guess next time should read the summary first huh ? :)
http://webreference.com/dev/frames/
A tutorial on using frames, copyrighted in 1996, that includes instructions on how to update one frame with a link in another.
SBC's patent was filed for in 1999.
Even assuming that SBC does infact have a firm hold on this idea (read: an air-tight patent ownership) it's highly unlikely that it'll even make a difference. It'll be thrown out (and/or) ignored. Just look at the case where BT said they own(ed) the patent to hyperlinks.
What's next? Is Verizon going to claim they own the patent to "<img src>" ?
I use iframes on my website to avoid learning PHP.. does that count too? or is it exempt because it doesn't stay static while navigating.
The funny part is, my website makes 0 dollars, would that mean I'd have to pay anyway? or would I be below the threshold?
If I get a bill.. All you motherfuckers are gonna pay. You are the ones who are the ball lickers! We're gonna fuck your mothers while you stand there and cry like whiney little bitches..
Latewire
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
The html frames you!
But seriously. Whether or not SBC owns the patent, it's a LUDICROUS patent to begin with! It's the equivelant of trying to patent the invention of paper (which the Egyptians and Chinese have prior art on).
So SBC can suck me and suck me hard. If I recieve a bill I'm just gonna shred it.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Thats just one more reason to not use frames in HTML...
Isn't there some restriction on what you can patent, in form of its use?
I know you can't patent an 'obvious' feature/advancement - what is obvious is decided by experts hired by the patent office (which is why new sciences always get odd patents through)
A patent can be revoked if 'prior art' exists to prove the guy can't legally be the patent holder - BTW, can patents be moved this way - i.e. A patents his 'one-click' feature, B proves he did it first, so the patent moves from A to B? Or does it simply disappear?
But isn't there some clause which says you can't patent a feature after everyone used it publicly for years?
I can just imagine some huge-bearded 3' guy with a club, wearing only a loincloth saying: "Hey, guys, I invented the wheel some 10,000 years ago, so, uh, pay up"
My other
I got the idea wrong - they filed the patent 1996 - prior art may or may not exist, Im not sure - I think my dad wrote prior art several years before 1996 - I'll check it out.
;)
Anyway, it seems we're fscked
Everyone has been using formats which seem open and free and public, but are actually patented and the patenter could, at any time, pop up and demand his money (see the threats, etc. over MP3 creation programs)
But still, it seems to me that the patent idea is ridicilous. They're not patenting a product they make, or a technique to make products, but an idea in product making - after all, anyone can claim they're not using 'their HTML' - you can't sue a person for writing 'what seems to be HTML' - only for using a product against its use license. I could be wrong, of course.
I think the Information Age caught the patent office a bit off-guard...
If these things don't sort out, we might find ourselves working in a completely patent/license world, where you have to pay to use every 'idea' someone made once.
My other
One of my clients got the same letter.
What about people with clostemy bags? I think you need an addendum to your patent.
http://www.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1995q 3/0566.html
You don't need frames to invalidate this patent. See the above-linked discussion of a 1995 browser's use of the <LINK> tag:
In any case, this might be a good case for everyone to send their (potentially) infringing links to the patent holder and refuse to pay. Maybe it will take something like that before the USPTO actually wakes up and realizes these things are absurd.
Even without prior art, I'd suspect a good case can be made that this is "obvious" which is also supposed to be unpatentable.
The real irony here is that British Telecom recently lost its patent claim that they had invented the hyperlink. Who were they suing? Prodigy...and who owns Prodigy? Why, SBC Communications.
Guess SBC was inspired?
Anyone notice the cute little "Fortune's Most Admired Companies" bullshit thing on their page.
Admired for being rapacious and greedy.
Reminds me of one of those old "Bloom County" strips where Oliver Wendell Jones manages to break into an ATT computer and is shown dressed as a pirate, waving a sword and crying "On to rape and pillage."
Odd that the comix are coming to life.
Anyway, I hope no one rolls over and pays up.
Navigator 2.0 had frames October 1995.
C'mon folks. This is a hoax! Why that one tiny site, but no others? Anyone do a search on "SBC Intellectual Property"? There's NOTHING out there except on this subject.
HOAX!
--Andrew Kantor (andrew@kantor.com)
I'm surprised that people have been so shallow in their search for prior art on this patent. There was a great deal of...
* Medio Magazine, the first "broad market" CDROM based magazine which published between 1993 and 1995 had, from day one a "frame" based interface that anticipated that which was later implemented in HTML.
* There were many "bookreader" or "document" reader products that worked on old VT100's that would display a "frame" of contents, or menu, at the top of the screen and then only repaint a portion of the screen when pages changed. I can't remember the names after all these years, but I think one was called "folio" and another was "flipbook", there was one built at Digital in the Methods and Tools group. Does anyone remember what it was called?
* Microsoft had a multimedia authoring package from about 1992 on that I think was called "Blackhawk"... It allowed you to set up "frames" on the page just like HTML later did. At Medio, we used an "extended" version of HTML which got converted into the codes that the MS tool needed... So, that's even prior use with an HTML variant.
* The numerous forms packages, FMS, TDMS, DECforms, etc. were all used to build "frame-based" interfaces on VT100 initially and later Bitmapped terminals.
* There used to be an emacs package called "info" that had some modes that would allow you to show a pane of links at the bottom of a page.
etc. etc.
I could go on, but this is really ridiculous.
The prior art cited above can be used to blow out the independent claims of the patent and should be used to force a formal reexamination by the patent office.
If you want to bust this patent, find some old farts who can remember things that happened before 1996 when 90% of the folk in this industry today were still doing something else. Frames aren't new.
Clearly the author of the SBC patent didn't know much history since the patent claims that SGML was "one of the first" markup languages and was developed by ISO... It wasn't. Even newbies to this industry should remember that the first application of UNIX was to do markup based text processing in the Bell Labs Patent office. runnoff, troff, nroff, etc. all came before SGML and Goldfarb, of IBM, had been touting predecessors to SGML for years before it got anywhere near ISO (which doesn't "develop" standards...).
This patent is garbage, as are so many others that have been issued lately. It is really too bad that this junk ends up giving the entire system of patenting a bad name. The base idea of patents is a very good one, but it has been abused to the point where it seems like we'll never be able to get from the system the value that it was intended to provide.
bob wyman